Deep Minds and Shallow Probes
Neural representations are not unique objects. Even when two systems realize the same downstream computation, their hidden coordinates may differ by reparameterization. A probe family intended to reveal structure already present in a representation should therefore be stable under the relevant representation symmetries rather than be tied to a particular basis. We prove that, under standard nondegeneracy assumptions, behaviorally equivalent LLMs have hidden representations related by an invertible affine transformation. The resulting symmetry principle singles out a unique hierarchy of shallow coordinate-stable probes, with linear probes as its degree-1 member. We also show that a natural...
| Authors | Su Hyeong Lee, Risi Kondor |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.LG |
| Published | 12 May 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 27 September 2026 |
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